Can you see the box above this text? If so, take note of it because it’s the subject matter of this post.
This is something of an advanced subject for this blog,1 but I had to get it out into the blog world since I’m kicking myself for not realizing it sooner.
So I run a blog read primarily by law students and it’s been difficult to figure out how to monetize it. What do law students need to buy? Highlighters, maybe. Maybe some textbooks, but I don’t know that I want to be a one-stop-shop for textbooks.
A while back I wrote a post that had little to do with the subject of the website and more to do with one of my hobbies. The post was linked by Kotaku and some other major gaming blogs, and that post soon became the #1 search result for several very popular Google searches relating to the game.
That was 6 months ago and while the blog traffic from Google and those other blogs isn’t what it used to be, I still pull in a good 500 hits per day just on those keywords. I had never taken advantage of the traffic until today when I had an epiphany.
Why Don’t I Sell Stuff Through WP Greet Box?
I wasn’t sure if WP Greet Box could be used in such a way, I actually just installed it last night, but I knew that the box got past adblock and was in a great place to greet my readers. After some tweaking, everyone coming to my website with the game’s name in the slug (including Google searches) was greeted with a personalized message asking them to buy the game’s expansion through my Amazon Affiliate link if they hadn’t yet purchased it. In 6 months, I never sold a single game through my affiliate banner on my sidebar, and tonight I’ve already sold 2 games.
I bet you want to get started, right? The first step is to install WP Greet Box on your WordPress blog. Now let’s say that you’re selling widgets, and you’ve already been linked from joshauriemma.com/check-out-this-widget-site, and you’re also starting to get some Google traffic about widgets.
First, go into your WordPress admin panel and click on WP Greet Box. At the next screen, click on “Add new greeting message” and add something along the lines of the following:
Things to note: in the Referrer URL box I’ve placed the URL that I know to be sending me business for widgets, and in the Greeting message, I’ve personally greeted them and pointed them towards my affiliate link for widgets. Now when someone comes to your webpage from the link here at joshauriemma.com, they’ll see the following message above the blog post:
Because Adblock doesn’t block the WP Green Box, you can see how this would be extraordinarily useful.
The solution to targeting Google visitors is a little bit hacky right now. You need to deactivate the standard Google greet, and create greets for your keyword targets. For instance, if I want to target all Google searches containing the term “widget” I would create a new greet where the Referrer URL was set to “*widget*”. The nice thing about this is that even if I’m linked in the future from a URL with the word “widget” in the slug, I’ll already have this greeting in place to target them with my widget affiliate link.
I look forward to hearing how you’ve put this suggestion to use on your own website!
- Meaning that at this point on this blog I haven’t built up enough traffic for this to matter. At the point where I have, I imagine these types of posts will become more frequent. [↩]
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This is a fantastic idea, and with the basic function of the plugin, you can tailor your ads depending on where they’re coming from, and therefore what you know they’re going to be interested in. …0ff to play around with…
@Alex, yep, that’s the idea. Please let me know if you think of any other interesting uses.
What a great tool and thanks for sharing it around with such a functional ad system many people would have not shared so thanks that you did! I hope it will work the same for me as well! Good luck in the sales!
Pretty nifty idea, I use Greet Box but don’t currently have an immediate use for this idea but I have bookmarked the page in case I suddenly need to make use of this.
Well done.
Here via Stumble Upon! (I’ll give it a thumbs up).